Description

The Emperor's Armor set is a variant of armor pieces that exists in the game, unavailable and unwearable by the player. It is identical in appearance to the Imperial Dragon Armor set that the player receives at the end of the main quest. The Emperor's Armor set, however, has better base stats and only one enchanted piece (the Emperor's Cuirass with a powerful enchantment, see in the mod's pictures). The Emperor's Armor set having higher stats and higher enchantability makes it a more desirable counterpart. After releasing my work with Playable Imperial Watch Armor, many reached out to me to make this set available for use, so here you go! This mod makes the Emperor's Armor set playable by the player character.

The mod also changes the value of each armor piece to match the value of their Imperial Dragon Armor counterparts. This is just for consistency and to make the armor not look out of place in the inventory. Note: the Emperor's Cuirass's extreme value stems from its powerful enchantments, not the value set in the Construction Set.

There is an alternative plugin to the main file that removes the enchantment from the cuirass of the set.

There is an optional retexture that replaces the green around the waist area and the hands of the Emperor's Armor with a black tone. Downloading this retexture will also apply it to the Imperial Dragon Armor as both armors share the same texture paths.

Acquisition

The Emperor's Armor set is only worn by Martin during the Defense of Bruma. This means that the armor normally cannot be acquired in the game.

This mod adds one "balanced" and somewhat justifiable way to acquire the armor. The armor pieces now sit atop and around the chests in the Imperial Guard Quarters (included in the mod's pictures for reference). The player can only get into these quarters during the quest The Ultimate Heist, also known as the final quest of the Thieves Guild. This makes the grind for a set that has Daedric stats and a powerful on enchantment on the cuirass to feel somewhat earned—plus, the player can headcanon that the Imperial Palace Guards are safekeeping an extra set of armor for the Emperor. One more caveat is that all the pieces are marked as owned by the Imperial Palace, so they will be considered stolen in your inventory. To remove this, you will have to sell them to a fence and rebuy them. If you use the default plugin that has the enchanted cuirass, you will most likely be paying a hefty price to get the armor back! I felt like the combination of receiving the armor at the end of a long questline + having to pay to remove the stolen tag justified the player getting such a strong set.

Alternatively, of course, you can just use the console commands listed below to receive the armor.

Emperor's Cuirass: player.additem 0003ABB9 1

Emperor's Boots: player.additem 0001FECE 1

Emperor's Gauntlets: player.additem 0001FED0 1

Emperor's Greaves: player.additem 0001FED1 1

Emperor's Helmet: player.additem 0001FED2 1

Installation

A Vortex installation should be as simple as clicking Mod manager download and using Vortex to deploy the mod once downloaded and installed.

For a manual installation, your .esp files should be located in \Oblivion Remastered\OblivionRemastered\Content\Dev\ObvData\Data. Once you have navigated to this folder, extract PlayableEmperorsArmor.esp into it. Open Plugins.txt (located in the same folder) and add PlayableEmperorsArmor.esp to the bottom of the list in order for the plugin to become active (if you have other mods, it should at least be going after all the game's plugins as well as the Altar plugins, but being above other plugins should be fine.)

If you want to install the optional retextures, the process is different for those files. For the EmperorArmor85_P.pak, EmperorArmor85_P.ucas, and EmperorArmor85_P.utoc files, you should navigate to \Oblivion Remastered\OblivionRemastered\Content\Paks\~mods. Extract these files to this location.

Tools Used

TESIV Construction Set - Used to mark the Emperor's Armor set as playable, change its value, place the armor pieces in the Imperial Guard Quarters, and remove the enchantment from the cuirass for the optional plugin

Fix NL - Copy Name from Previous Override - xEdit Script by MadAborModding - xEdit script needed to remove the [NL] prefix that Oblivion Remastered applies to modded items

TES4Edit (aka xEdit) - Used to remove the [NL] prefix that Oblivion Remastered applies to modded items